JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby

Brendan Eich, working at Netscape Communications, designed the first version of JavaScript in just ten days in May 1995, under intense pressure to ship a scripting language for Netscape Navigator before a looming release deadline. Originally called Mocha, then LiveScript, it was renamed JavaScript largely as a marketing move to capitalize on the unrelated but then-fashionable Java, even though the two languages share little beyond superficial C-like syntax. Eich based JavaScript's core design on a mix of Scheme's functional influences, the Self language's prototype-based object model, and a syntax deliberately made to look familiar to Java programmers.